Brig wrote:I use a program called
Everything (forgive me for going outside the family). It's super fast and super easy.
You see, I rather wish you hadn't said that - now Nikos is going to think you're an alter-ego of mine. I said
precisely the same thing to him a few months back when he first mooted the idea of integrating WDS, and he just gave a great harumph, twirled the ends of his moustache (surely a sign of true evil) and said, "Yes, but that's limited to file-names only - it doesn't do anything else."
"True," I agreed, "but I imagine that if there were metrics available on what people predominantly searched for, they would show it to be filenames - not all that fancy stuff that is nice to have when you need it, but tends to get really annoying when all you want is chocolate_muffin.file and you wanted it
five minutes ago."
"We'll see, " said he enigmatically, still twirling with his greasy fingers, "we'll see."
The Everything Engine is also nice in that it doesn't use Window's indexing, so that can be disabled and (no pun intended) everything is still available. A slight limitation being x86-only, and it's not exactly supported anymore, but for simple jobs it just does what it says on the tin without the fuss of waiting... waiting... waiting... oh wait... nope, still waiting...
* * *
Amusingly, I would be remiss if I did not save Nikos the trouble of mentioning that if you want x2/WDS searches to be much faster (
but limited to filenames-only), you can play with the registry value:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ZabaraKatranemia Plc\xplorer2_UC\
szFastSearchProps
and set it to "system.filename" (or, indeed, any of the other
system.* properties).
There are so many drawbacks to doing this, I can't possibly recommend it to people, but it's there for those of us who like to mess with things those big screws with weird screwdriver-heads in the dashboard were meant to keep us away from.
(Not the least limitation is that it only matches whole-names, or right-side-only completion, and it can't actually match loose text
within a filename which makes it somewhat useless, but it's there for the loveless and forlorn to experiment with - and it does speed things up surprisingly.)